Mohamed Nasheed carries the air of a man without much time. ''How did it go? Did we win?'' he asks an aide as he sweeps, almost at a run, down the marbled corridors of the presidential office.

Told yes, the vote on the reappointment of his Minister of Islamic Affairs had succeeded in his country's fractious parliament, he is pleased: ''That's good, our minister keeps his job. Now, what's next?'' The offhand manner is no affectation. Nasheed is a man running out of time.

As the President of the Maldives, the string of paradisiacal Indian Ocean islands that could become the first nation lost - entirely - to climate change, there are not many minutes to waste for Nasheed.

Mohamed Nasheed. Photo: Bloomberg

''We've already lost it in so many senses,'' he tells the Herald during a rare moment of peace in a meeting room. His country is losing three inhabited islands a year, swallowed by the ocean, he explains.

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''People are saying, 'We can't live there any more.' For us, it is difficult not to be worried about the climate.''

Nasheed is compact: 1.57 metres and leanly built, with square shoulders and a narrow waist. Maldivian humidity means jackets are usually eschewed but the 44-year-old favours formality with silver cufflinks and ties with broad knots. As he speaks, the clipped tones of his British public school education fight for space through the lyrical lilt of Maldivian English.

As a man who lives with the consequences of climate change, and looks out his window at a rising sea every day, Nasheed brooks no argument from deniers.

Even Male´ - the Maldivian capital and the most densely populated island in the world, with more than 110,000 people crammed onto 1.77 square kilometres of land - required tens of millions of dollars spent on a three-metre sea wall to keep the ocean out.

''The science here is very sorted,'' Nasheed says. ''They say there is a window of opportunity of about seven or eight years.''

For some in this archipelago, that window is already closed. Already, 14 of 200 inhabited islands are gone. Coastal erosion has made their seaside villages unliveable. A further 70 islands rely on desalinated drinking water because aquifers have been overcome by seawater. At least 80 per cent of the Maldivian landmass is less than a metre above sea level, the archipelago's highest point a mere 2.4 metres above high tide.

A sea-level rise of 59 centimetres over the next century, the upper limit forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would render most of the Maldives uninhabitable.

The government is already saving money, stashed away from its $600 million tourism industry, to give it the option of buying land in another country. Sri Lanka and India, for their proximity, and Australia, for its space, are the names that have been publicly considered.

But that is a last resort.

Maldivians, whose families have spent countless generations living on ''their'' island, cannot bear the thought of moving to the next atoll, Nasheed says. They cannot fathom abandoning the country.

''I said to one lady, 'Ma'am you have to move, we have to take you to another island. And at the end of this whole thing we might have to go elsewhere, all of us.' She told me, 'You can take the island people away but you can't take the sounds away, you can't take the butterflies, you can't take the colours' … You can migrate a people but you cannot take a culture, you cannot take a nation, you cannot take a history.''

For a man whose country needs the world's co-operation to survive, Nasheed can be undiplomatic. The French newspaper Le Monde recently quoted him as saying of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ''the current negotiation process is stupid, useless and endless''.

To the Herald, he does not exactly own up to the incendiary language but nor does he shy from its sentiment. ''I think this UN FCCC is silly … It's built in a form where if two countries agree and a third country comes around and says 'I don't', then you dilute your positions to accommodate the third country.''

He wants the process abandoned, only suggesting in replacement ''a more imaginative way of dealing with it''.

Nasheed believes developed countries, although the largest emitters, are not the only ones who must bear the burden of emissions cuts. The right of developing countries to lift their citizens' standard of living does not absolve them from their obligations to the planet.

''If the West stopped their emissions and China, South Africa and Brazil carried on emitting on the basis of business as usual, we would still die. The Maldives would disappear,'' he said during a recent European visit.

Nasheed appreciates the complexities of trying to engineer a global climate deal that has so far eluded 17 congresses in as many years.

He understands his bargaining position, and the domestic pressures guiding the hands of other nations. He realises, too, his is a nation without economic, military or diplomatic clout.

Nasheed is not above a stunt to draw attention to his country's plight, or to the Alliance of Small Island States, of which he is totemic leader. In 2009 Nasheed and his ministers dressed in scuba gear for the world's first underwater cabinet meeting. The same year he allowed a documentary crew to follow him through his negotiations at the Copenhagen climate talks. The film that emerged, The Island President, won acclaim at film festivals.

The week the Herald was in Male´, Nasheed invited the country's media to watch him install a solar panel on the roof of the President's Office building, part of his pledge to make the Maldives carbon neutral by 2020.

For a man perpetually short of hours in his day, there was a time when Nasheed had nothing but time.

Returning to the Maldives from Britain in the late 1980s, he became an outspoken critic of the despotic one-party rule of his predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Nasheed was jailed in 1991, the first of more than a dozen times he would be arrested and imprisoned. He was tortured by the Gayoom regime, and spent 18 months in solitary confinement in a tiny metal shack.

Released, he was elected to Parliament in 2000 but jailed again on trumped-up charges of stealing ''unidentified government property''. On his final release in 2003 he fled the Maldives for Sri Lanka, where he established the Maldivian Democratic Party in exile. He returned to a hero's welcome in 2005. Three years later, in the first ever multi-party elections held in the Maldives, he beat Gayoom in a run-off vote, securing 54 per cent of the vote.

Nasheed finds himself leader of a country facing significant problems beyond rising seas. None are unique to a developing Muslim country or an island state but they are especially acute in his tiny, diffuse homeland.

The Maldives has a huge youth bulge - 44 per cent of the country is under 14 and 62 per cent under 25 - but jobs outside tourist resorts are hard to find. In the atolls, a quarter of all young men are unemployed, as are half of all young women.

The country also has a serious drug problem. An epidemic of cheap heroin has swept through the archipelago and taken root in Male´ in particular. The UN has estimated 40 per cent of the country's youth use hard drugs.

The Maldives constitution obliges all Maldivians to be Muslim but the nation also faces a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.

Wahhabist Islamic scholars, most schooled in madrassas in Pakistan, are radicalising Islam in the Maldives. Female circumcision is practised and is reportedly on the increase. Across the archipelago, there are calls for the return of amputation for crimes and for the banning of music and dancing. Women are flogged for having extramarital sex.

Every effort to resist this gathering radicalisation is painted by Nasheed's political opponents as an attack on Islam. After Islamist protesters threatened on a website to ''slaughter anybody against Islam'', Nasheed declared ''kill me before you kill a fellow Maldivian''.

Financially, too, the Maldives' dependence on wealthy Western tourists has left it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global economy. The International Monetary Fund has withheld loans, declaring the Maldives at moderate risk of debt distress, and forced the country to introduce an income tax and a GST, as well as to severely reduce government spending - largely through cutting the country's bloated public service.

Everywhere in the Maldives, the government's new frugality is apparent. The former Presidential Palace has become the Supreme Court (Nasheed lives in his own house). Even the ornate leather thrones used to greet official visitors have been replaced by bottom-of-the-line blue-cloth office chairs.

But climate change dominates the President's agenda. While the course of global climate action is largely in the hands of others, Nasheed says he feels a sense of responsibility to do what he can to save his country.

''Any responsible Maldives government should be mindful of what might happen in the future and save for that rainy day.'' His government talks of climate contingencies, of floating islands, desalination and of making a new homeland in other countries but he believes the Maldives' only chance lies with holding back the tide.

''If we start seeing disasters one after the other, I think that would be … when countries would suddenly start acting. Now that might be very late in the day, but perhaps it is already very late … it's getting very, very late.''